Our Speakers
We are lucky to have a fantastic line-up of local and national talent for the first Web Design Day. Read more to get to know our speakers better.
Geoff Barnes
Information Architecture as Storytelling
Geoff Barnes is currently Senior Information Architect at Elliance, Inc, a Pittsburgh E-Marketing company where he works to articulate the inevitable intersection of content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design for an array of clients from higher education, non-profits, community banks, and the manufacturing sector.
He was previously the lead UI designer for Collaborative Fusion, Inc, Professor of Painting at The Savannah College of Art and Design, and co-founder of San Francisco web services firm Trendmedia. Geoff moved to Pittsburgh in 2001 to help create and launch the BFA of Media Arts Web Design program at Robert Morris University.
Christopher Cashdollar
Creative Director, Happy Cog
Creative Springboard: What Web Design Can Learn from Magazine Design
Christopher Cashdollar is a graphic designer, illustrator, and interactive team leader with web design experience dating back to the mid 1990s. He has provided consultative strategy and design direction for vastly diverse clients such as LG Mobile, Northwestern Mutual, GlaxoSmithKline, Heartland Payment Systems, T. Rowe Price, Ford Motor Company, SAP, McNeil Pediatrics, and Verizon.
Christopher brings a keen eye and creative focus to defining how user-experience successfully marries beautiful, purposeful design. He earned his undergraduate degree from Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design and briefly studied abroad at The University of Northampton in the United Kingdom.
When not working, Christopher loves illustrating, painting, record shopping, and spending time with his family, including his Italian Greyhound named Penny. Raised in Mars, PA Chris is proud to be a Fighting Planet and despite living in Philadelphia since 1995, he will only cheer for sports teams that wear the Black 'n' Gold.
Val Head
Getting Past the Blame Game: Observations on Designer-Client Relationships.
Val is currently a Senior Designer/Developer at New Perspective in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a founder and organizer of the Flashpitt conference, as well as a frequent contributor to the Pittsburgh Adobe Flash User Group (PittMFUG) and Refresh Pittsburgh. She maintains a blog at thisisportable.com and hopes to one day have more followers than her cat, @thedignan, on twitter.
Whitney Hess
Misconceptions in User Experience
Whitney Hess is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She helps make stuff easy and pleasurable to use.
Prior to going independent, Whitney was on the design team at Liquidnet, an international financial software company that runs the leading electronic marketplace for wholesale stock-trading. Previously, she was an interaction designer at two marketing agencies, Digitas and Tribal DDB, where her clients included American Express, The New York Times, Allstate, Claritin, Tropicana, and EarthLink. Most notably, she helped to conceive, design, and test an innovative card search tool for American Express, and is named as a co-inventor on its U.S. patent.
Though she began her higher education in computer science, Whitney received a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing and a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. For the Master’s capstone project, she was one of five HCI students to develop Roadcasting, a system that allows drivers to create and share their music playlists with other cars on the road. The project has received press from Wired, MIT Tech Review, Slashdot, BoingBoing, and more.
Whitney is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and user experience consultant for boxee, among other startups and major corporations. She writes about technology and customer experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain.
Jason Robb
"What the Wireframe?" - A Pragmatic Approach to Wireframes
Jason Robb is a graphic designer, he loves typography, cookies, and wailing on a harmonica. He’s a Pittsburgh native, born and raised in the South Hills. He went to school at the Community College of Allegheny County. He now calls Boston, MA home, where he works at a small startup called MyHappyPlanet - a language education company. At MyHappyPlanet, he designs riffraff-free interfaces, evangelizes the user experience, and sketches lots of wireframes. When he’s not doing that, he blogs on his personal site (http://jasonrobb.com), and collects UI Scraps (http://uiscraps.tumblr.com).
Josh Sager
The Story of a Web Project: Process and Best Practices
Curiosity has led Josh down the path of many titles, such as Cartoonist, Creative Director, and Senior Developer. He got his start as a grade school hacker writing apps like 30 goto 10 and drawing cartoons on his spelling tests. Eventually pulling both sides of his brain together, Josh entered into the world of creative development and is endlessly fascinated with imaginative problem solving, development, and design. Josh’s love for creative technologies is matched only by his passion of sharing it. A graduate of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Josh has since worked for a dot com, a few e-learning companies, and is currently a Multimedia Instructor for the Pittsburgh Technical Institute. In 2008 he started an on-campus special interest group called The Grid, which researches alternative methods of user interaction with web technologies. You can find him at joshsagermedia.com.
Samantha Warren
Typography is the Foundation of Good Web Design
Samantha is a web designer and typophile at Viget Labs, an all inclusive web agency outside of Washington, DC. In addition to being a board member of the Art Directors Club of Washington, DC she also teaches part time at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts DC campus. In her spare time she updates her blog BadAssIdeas.com.